Jewel Debuts Urban Fresh Store

CHICAGO — Supervalu’s Jewel-Osco division debuted its entry into the small-format store race yesterday with a location in this city’s trendy Lincoln Park neighborhood. The 16,000-square-foot store, dubbed Urban Fresh by Jewel, seeks to offer convenience and high quality in the form of prepared and partially prepared lunch and dinner offerings, a spokesman for the chain told SN. “Right now this is a one-of-a-kind store, and we don’t have any plans to roll this out any further,” said Miguel Alba, the Jewel spokesman. The store is soliciting feedback from customers through a new website, urbanfresh.net. The store is located at the site of a former Sunflower Market, the organic-and-natural specialty chain that Minneapolis-based Supervalu scrapped last year after a brief test. Among the offerings at the Urban Fresh by Jewel store are 300 varieties of beer and wine and 300 varieties of cheese. It offers about 6,000 SKUs, compared with a typical supermarket’s 45,000 offerings, but includes basic staples like milk, eggs, bread and produce in addition to specialty and prepared offerings. Of the store’s 10 checkout lanes, six are self-checkout, the company said. Alba said the store has about 75 employees, vs. the 200 that staff a typical full-size Jewel has.